


The Talfmann Constant

by levendis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, First Time, Resolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 08:57:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7928626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time is a reckoning: Lady Me, Clara, and everything that comes after the initial running away. Post-"Hell Bent".</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Talfmann Constant

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who prompted: Clara and Ashildr/Me, travelling and going from UST to doing the do.

 

Time is a series of consequences.

  
  
The TARDIS hurtled aimlessly through space. The lever flipped, the dial spun; the ship side-stepped into the time vortex and drifted.  
  
"It's okay," Clara said, nearing the cliff's-edge of her giddy excitement. "I'm okay."  
  
Lady Me tried to find something to look at other than Clara. Would it be rude to keep reading the manual?  
  
"It just hit me all at once, is all. And it might be good to..." She paused, as if waiting for Me to finish the sentence.  
  
Me said nothing.  
  
"...Look before we leap," Clara finished. "Right? Where are we even going? We can't just go anywhere, that's how you wind up sucked into a black hole." She said this as if recalling a specific incident in which she had, in fact, been sucked into a black hole.  
  
The manual, then, might as well. _Chapter One: An Introduction to Venkali Folds and the Pipeline Theory._ What? Me did her best to seem immersed in the text. "My relative technical expertise here, I'm relying on you to take the wheel, metaphorically speaking. You're the adventurer, not me."  
  
"Says the last human left alive at the end of time," Clara said.  
  
"I never went all that far. Off-world, a few times, just for something to do. But I always came back." Me flipped the page, tilted her head at the frankly baffling diagram. She snapped the manual shut, obscurely irritated that this conversation was now about her and what she'd done. Or not done. Or - whatever.  
  
"You felt obligated."  
  
"Spite played a large part as well." Me slid her thumb over the edge of the manual, pages ticking past. Too soon, maybe? For even an implication? They hadn't talked about it.  
  
Clara smiled, nodded. "Yeah. I remember that feeling. Used to feel like I could shift whole planets out of their orbit just through sheer anger."  
  
"He had that effect," Me said carefully. Still toying with the manual, the flutter-snap of the pages under her thumb.  
  
"But enough about the past." Clara's smile grew just a touch too bright. "Let's talk about the future. Where d'you wanna go?"  
  
"No clue." Me flipped the manual back open to the chapter on navigation, squinting as the translation matrix struggled to reform the words into Technical-Standard Common.  
  
"Not even a bit of a clue? A vague opinion?" Clara in Me's peripheral vision, hands on her hips, mock-diapproving.  
  
_First, prime the cyclospin by aligning the exo-plasmic regulators to the desired reticulator sockets. The Halendracovorno method may be used to account for temporal slippage but requires installation of an Endhel compressor model X9-V or X9-W, depending on relative flux positioning._  
  
Me closed the book again and rested it on top of the console. "Wherever you'd like to go is fine, I'm sure."  
  
"At least help me narrow it down a bit. City or countryside?"  
  
"Either."  
  
"Culture or nature?" Undeterred, if flagging a bit. Bless her white cotton socks.  
  
"Nature, I suppose. I could do with some peace and quiet." That came out a bit harsher than Me had intended.  
  
Clara slumped, half-rallied. "We could put it on random."  
  
"I have literally no idea how to do that."  
  
"The psychic circuits?"  
  
"I'm not sure that's wise." Again, harsher than she intended. "Oh, I know. TARDIS!"  
  
The console beeped cheerfully in response, one of the many lights flickering to life. Me patted the lever next to the light awkwardly. "Take us somewhere nice? Please?"  
  
"Not sure it works like that," Clara muttered.  
  
But the ship did - something, anyway. Wheezed and groaned and jolted under their feet, and then stopped. Something breaking and sparking, a puff of smoke. The console beeped twice, and the doors opened.  
  
"Apparently it does," Me said. She gestured to the doorway: after you.  
  
(They had to do something about the diner bit. It deflated the dramatic effect, having to walk through a tacky American restaurant before the grand reveal. Me rushed ahead and swung that door open as well. After you. Clara grinned, and stepped out into the unknown.)  


 

* * *

  
  
They both agreed it was best to avoid Earth. Lady Me because she'd been there, done that; Clara for a variety of reasons under the guise of it being more interesting to see the universe outside her doorstep. Me didn't press the issue; she didn't have any particular interest in running into the Doctor, either.  
  
Not that they mentioned him. Clara's occasional watery eyes notwithstanding. She could run, if she had to. Run as fast and as far as she could. Me knew what that was like.  
  
The dial turned, the level flipped, the manual beginning to make a marginal amount of sense. The Talfmann Constant: all objects in the vortex exist at a temporal index of 1.7qk. How to calculate exit points, spatial vectors, the location of the nearest fixed point. What switch to flip when. The ship guiding itself along, landing clumsily into the dirt or concrete or no-analoguous-word-for-it of yet another planet.  
  
Planet, or: way station, asteroid, autonomous hydroponics satellite, war ship. Over and over, one after another, like Clara would fall apart if she stopped moving.  
  
Me, who hadn't moved much in the past few dozen centuries, found this foreign and incredibly exhausting. All the new things. New people. The ship chirping and slipping under and re-emerging. Clara being Clara, an unstoppable force of nature that still found it difficult to meet Me's eyes with anything approaching honesty.  
  
Maybe this had been a mistake. Maybe Me shouldn't be here. Maybe she should have stayed at the end of the universe, waiting for the next big bang. At least she'd be able to catch her breath.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
It had been at least a hundred years since Me had been engaged in a significant relationship. Maybe, probably longer; the days had a day of rolling together. She'd written it down, she could go back and check, but her library had been too heavy to carry around for a while now, ultralight biotech storage aside. The data gel was in storage in the Astra-to-Walkerton sprawl on New Earth. So, approximately, guesstimating: it'd been a while.

And it was strange, to say the least, to suddenly have to exist with someone else. She realized she came off as odd, standoffish. She had her routines. Clara seemed to delight in breaking those routines. Like she was doing, for no conceivable reason, right now.  
  
"Look," Me said, hiding her face behind a mug of tea. "I enjoy our time together. But I also need some time to myself."  
  
Clara rolled her eyes. "Right. Yeah, so do I, everyone does. Days at a time, though?"  
  
Steam from the tea wafting over her. The smell, the heft of it; it was a very careful blend. She'd had time to perfect it. "Time takes on a different meaning, once you've lived as long as I have."  
  
Clara nodded. Not like she understood, but like she was willing to concede the point. "Just let me know when you're ready for company, okay?"  
  
"Of course." Unsaid: _you don't need to wait for me, you know. You can do this on your own._

 

* * *

  
  
Late afternoon, a city. Steel and glass or approximations thereof. A human colony, an outpost on the furthest orbit around a dying sun.  
  
Clara had gone of in search of - something, some hunch, sniffing out danger and adventure. Me was content to sit in a cafe, her mobile phone tapped into the local network. There was an election on, apparently. New fashions for the fall. A televisual entertainment overview, on-demand documentaries, live-streamed comedies.  
  
She was checking out Comedy #1974 when she felt it. That thing. The shift, the unease. Time warping around something nearby.  
  
Around _him._  
  
The Doctor, a touch older and significantly less wounded than the last time she'd seen him. Wearing too many layers of clothing and then too many bags and satchels on top of that. Alone, at least in this cafe. Maybe he wouldn't notice her.  
  
He noticed her. And clomped over, bags knocking against chairs; she tried to ignore him until she absolutely had to acknowledge him.  
  
"Ashildr," he said.  
  
She didn't correct him. "Doctor."  
  
"What brings you to these parts?"  
  
"Sight-seeing."  
  
He grinned. "Yes, the architecture here is astounding, and the sculpture tours out in the wastelands, not to be missed. I mean, I'm here because of a distress call, you know how it is, all work and no play, but I do still hope to be able to take in some of the local culture." All in one breath, words running into each other like he was afraid to stop and think about what he was saying.  
  
"You're not looking for her." A question, or a statement, or a demand.  
  
"D'you think that poorly of me?" He shifted his improbable collection of duffle bags and guitar cases to a more comfortable position. World's most unlikely pack mule.  
  
"I've met you."  
  
"Fair. But no. What's done is done."  
  
She took stock: bittersweet, an old comfortable sadness but not likely something he wore every day. He was telling the truth, probably. "Good. She deserves better."  
  
"Like you?"  
  
It could have been smug and dismissive and angry, but it wasn't, not quite. Maybe he even meant it. She didn't answer the question, either way.  
  
"So you've moved on, then? Found someone new?"  
  
"I always do. How else do you keep going? Life's for the living, not moping around and burying yourself in the past."  
  
"Something tells me you've done more than your fair share of moping."  
  
He laughed, a wry self-deprecating huff. "Yeah, well. It's a process. On that note, I've got something for you. And before you start, yes, I did sort of know I'd bump into you today, but it's not a weird stalkery universe-ending thing, promise." Most of that said into the topmost duffle bag, swung around to his front. He was pawing around for something, head half inside. He came up, triumphant, with a - thing. He thrust it at her.  
  
She took it gingerly. It looked like a flower, made out of a fluid, fluttering silk-like material. "Um," she said.  
  
"Whoops," he said, and snatched it back, shoving it into the bag. "Wrong person. Or right person, wrong - nevermind. Right, okay, here we go, take two." He shoved a small box into her hands.  
  
If it was any sort of jewelry she'd kick him in the shins. She glared at him as she peeled the tape off and removed the lid. Inside was, what. A pen? She lifted it carefully out of the box between thumb and forefinger.

"A pen," she said.  
  
"The best pen ever made. Zebra J-roller. I put a bit of stuff in the ink cartridge so it should be good for a long while. Longer than the usual pen, I mean." He was so terribly excited and expectant and that familiar thing, the 'assume rejection just in case' thing.  
  
She knew that last feeling well. She forced a smile, tried to keep the cringing empathy out her face. "Thanks."  
  
"For your journals," he said, shuffling the bag around to the pile on his back. "You still keep those, right?"  
  
Not so much, no. Maybe she should. The smile felt a mite bit more genuine, now. "Yes. Yeah, this will be great for that. Thank you, again."  
  
He was looking at her like he knew she was lying about the journals and like he knew that he'd made her reconsider the no-cataloguing policy. The bastard.  
  
She tucked the box into her purse. "I should go," she said, nodding vaguely off to her left.  
  
"Same," he said, nodding vaguely off to his left.  
  
They stared at each other for a few loaded seconds, then he abruptly turned away, slogging through the crowd with his five thousand bags. She watched him go, before snapping out of it and turning to head off on her own path, back home.  
  
  
(When, exactly, had she started thinking of it as home?)  
  
  


* * *

  
  
The front was still 50's American kitsch. They'd given up any hope of figuring out the chameleon circuit, or the TARDIS had decided it enjoyed being a diner, or both. The back had started to change, though.  
  
There was Clara's room, which Me knew of but had never visited. Me's room, which was plain and kept at a lowish temperature, lights dimmed. The library. A garden with a duck pond, because Me had thought one day that it might be nice to just sit on a bench and feed breadcrumbs to ducks, and then there it was. A wardrobe room, racks of clothing stretching out into infinity. Some things that flickered into existence and then immediately vanished, some things that stretched and shifted and scattered. The ship making sense of itself. A secondary console room, which had the distinct feeling of being a copy built from memory. Me could guess what the copy was of.  
  
One room with a queen-sized bed, satin sheets, a chest at the foot of the bed Me wasn't nosy enough to unlatch. Clara's, she assumed, although there'd yet to be any add-ons, any boys brought home. Or girls, or etc.  
  
A door at the end of a very long hallway Me was afraid to open. Miles of confused, hopeful attempts at technological metaphor. The manual still didn't make much sense, but she was fairly certain there were no actual cables involved. For sure, the heart of the ship was not literally a bank of massive mid-20th-century computers, tape reels whirring.  
  
And a kitchen, where Me tended to end up whenever the ship was resting in the vortex and she was tired of staying in her room. There was an electric kettle and a scarred wooden table and a refrigerator that hummed, filled with takeaway containers and a perpetual quart of milk that refilled itself via a mechanism Me didn't want to examine too closely.  
  
The kitchen was where Me realized she might've been lying to herself, just a bit.  
  
Late night, or far along in the period of time they'd silently agreed to be the no-talk, no-adventure resting period of their vaguely defined day, Me had wandered away from a standard bout of insomnia in search of a hot cuppa, trusting the ship to guide her. The scenic route, probably. It still seemed eager to show off what it could do. But she found the kitchen eventually. Door ajar, light on. Me gently pushed the door the rest of the way open, cringing at the creak it made.  
  
Clara was curled up on one of the chairs, in a nightgown and robe, legs tucked under her. She glanced up, smiled weakly, as Me shuffled in.  
  
"Hey," she said.  
  
Me grunted noncommittally, put the kettle on to boil, rifled through the box of tea bags.  
  
"Sorry. I know this is. Kind of your place. I just."  
  
Me turned, caught the edges of something flickering away as Clara shrugged it off. "It's okay," she said, ripping open the tea packet, dropping the bag into a charity-shop mug. "Mi casa es su casa."  
  
Something left unsaid, as it ever was. Clara looked like she was on the verge of tears. The kettle hit boiling point. Water poured, mug left on the counter to steep, Me slowly made her way to the other chair, across the table from Clara.  
  
She had a whole library of books detailing why it was bad to care for someone so much all you wanted was to wrap them up in your arms and hold them. Still. The impulse was there.  
  
"Couldn't sleep?" she asked.  
  
"As per usual," Clara replied.  
  
An itch in her fingers, an emptiness. A sort of desire, if she were honest. How long had it been since she'd even hugged someone? Her standard low-level loneliness, that's what this was. Nothing specific. Nothing to do with how small, how oddly vulnerable and open Clara was right now. In her nightgown, in Me's kitchen, probably just mourning all the simple pleasures she no longer had access to. No tea and biscuits for the young and the dead.  
  
Me remembered her tea, suddenly. Jumped up to rescue it from overbrewed bitterness, teabag in the trash chute and milk poured in and it was only just below optimal temperature when she sipped it, settling back down on her chair.  
  
"Do you mind?" Me asked, belatedly, pointing at her mug.  
  
Clara shook her head. "Nah. If anything, I'm happy to live vicariously through you."  
  
Me wrapped her hands around the mug, the heat leaching into her skin. Considering: this moment, and its relative import, and whether it'd be worth saving come next memory cull. Considering, out of the corner of her eye, Clara's bared neck, the tendons and muscles and bones of her shoulders, the particular curve of her mouth.  
  
She met Clara's eyes. Knowing, eyebrows at a bemused angle. Oh.  
  
"I'd wondered," Clara said softly, some of the usual steel unfolding in her posture, her gaze.  
  
Me hid her face behind the mug of tea. "Yes. Well. Now you know." She hoped they were talking about the same thing.  
  
"Do you want - ?"  
  
So uncertain under all that bluster, and so young, and Me was so goddamn _old_. She smiled, self-deprecating, and shook her head.  
  
"No," she said. "Not like this anyway. We're both tired, we're..." Lonely, searching, looking for something to fill this hole. "Not in the right frame of mind, I think."  
  
They were talking about the same thing, right? Where were they going, anyway?  
  
Clara nodded and folded herself up even smaller, chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around her legs. "Just a thought. Didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."  
  
"You make me incredibly uncomfortable in a hell of a lot of different ways. This isn't one. You're okay."  
  
They were okay. Me hoped they were, anyway.  


 

* * *

  
  
_Successful landings of course rely on the careful sorting of available entryways, cross-checked against the local database of temporal points of interest and compensating for any turbulence or Alsheim-Denner effects._

  
  
Time is a reckoning.

  
  
Cities of gleaming spires and cities on fire and cities too corrupt not to collapse under their own weight. Clara loved cities. Cities as mechanisms, cities as organisms. The momentum, the crowds, skyscrapers and tunnels and noise. The TARDIS chauffeured them dutifully along to the next one, and the next, and the next.  
  
Clara against concrete and steel and reasonable facsimiles thereof. Clara in her pale yellow sundress and her trainers with heels, her oversized sunglasses. Clara running too far ahead, reckless, moving faster than Me can ever remember doing herself. Clara forever disappearing around corners. The youth of today, for a given value of 'today'. For a certain definition of 'youth'. Always so much energy. A resiliency, a refusal to ever be hurt, or be stopped.  
  
_You're immortal too_ , Clara would say, too close, taking Me's hands in hers. Me would feel where the pulse wasn't anymore; this strangeness, the arrested life, hanging onto her. Something in Clara's eyes.  
  
_So let loose. Relax. Stop worrying so much._ Clara would snatch her hands back, act like she'd almost admitted to a terrible secret.  
  
Clara in formal satin, Clara in flannel and denim. Dressing for the occasion, always. Performative, narrative. Too close and too much and biting her lip as she turned away. Me letting her hands drop back down to her sides, letting the story of the day progress.  
  
She wasn't _him_ , after all.  
  


* * *

  
  
Me had left it to chance, once. The forgetting. Write it all down and hope that the dead skin would be properly sloughed off, nothing needed or wanted lost. Knock on wood and toss the dice, and hope you don't lose more than you have to. These days the routine was a bit more precise. Standardized, guided by the best of 24th century technology - upgraded as necessary, as was prudent, of course. Electrodes pressed to her temples, a small black box, a user-friendly interface. Memories scanned, marked for deletion. The weight lifted off.  
  
In her room, wired-up. A life, or a few years of it, in fast-forward on the screen. Most of this was pointless. Most of this meant nothing. Easy enough to let go of.  
  
The keyboard under her fingertips, buttons automatically shifting. Her brain shifting. Lurching, finding its feet again, as the memories were offloaded.  
  
There was a knock on the door. Or there'd been, for some time, a series of knocks on the door, but this was the one she'd noticed.  
  
"Come in," she said, and maybe that was a mistake. Probably was. This had always been a private thing, even back in the days of ink and quill.  
  
Clara opened the door, hovering in the doorway. "Sorry. Am I interrupting?"  
  
Yes, she was. Me closed her eyes and breathed in deeply and felt the bite of the connecting points against her temples. She wanted to be interrupted, possibly. "Almost done."  
  
Doing what? "Okay," Clara said, edging into the room, her hands clasped together at her waist.  
  
Silence, for a while. Me flinching as the tendrils of the device wove through her, tugging bits of her away.  
  
"Are you alright?"  
  
"Fine," Me ground out. Scraped clean and bled dry and purified, or at least that was the romanticised version. Light enough at least, now, to keep moving.  
  
"What. What is it doing to you?"  
  
Me dug her hands into her thighs, breathing shaky as the tendrils pushed deeper. "Housekeeping."  
  
"Okay."  
  
"It's essentially - " There was no reason to have this conversation. "It helps me pick what memories to save and what to store away. Like a diary."  
  
"D'you forget? What you've...stored away?"  
  
"Yes," Me said, understanding the implications.  
  
Clara swallowed, hard. "Right," she said, voice thick and tight.  
  
"Just the unimportant things. To save space. After so long, if you're not careful, you can wind up with a head full of pop song lyrics and nothing of value." Jokey, ha ha, sweating under the electrodes.  
  
"Makes sense."  
  
"I wouldn't." Out with it, already. "I wouldn't forget you," Me said.  
  
"I couldn't," Me said.  
  
"You're - you're important," Me said.  
  
Clara, maybe, believed her.

 

* * *

  
  
The city was hot and bright, concrete and steel and glass, or approximations thereof. Me was sweating, Clara was easy and effortless in a thin cotton dress. Trainers with heels, the few extra inches that afforded her. The canyon they were walking through, the skyscrapers towering to either side.  
  
The looks they got, as mono-headed bipedals in a port city that didn't see much in the way of humanoids. The compact, crystaline creatures scuttling past, heads turning and staring before politely snapping forward again. The TARDIS translation matrix was struggling. Some of the spoken language, none of the written, street signs and shop signs blurring and flickering as the algorithm failed to make sense of them. The hustle, the crowds, the strangeness and odd familiarity of all this.  
  
Clara running ahead, laughing.

 

* * *

  
  
Time is a river, a cobblestone road, a fern.  
  
This planet, the architects built a scaffolding and planted trees underneath. Living buildings. There'd been something of an apocalypse in the planet's past, the end result of rampant unconscious industrialism; the bones of the old world disintegrating underneath, concrete and steel and the vines resolutely pushing their way through. Now, nature given its due again, its rightful place. Where the society's endeavors had failed, flowers blooming, moss spreading. The world in itself. Skyscrapers swayed gently in the breeze, rustling, the late-afternoon sun rippling over them.  
  
Under a canopy of green leaves and pale pink flowers, Clara was talking with the man who'd guided them past the central garden gates and up the winding paths, a history lesson as they went. He had long fingers and broad shoulders and an easy, relaxed way of talking. Clara was laughing at his jokes, and he was laughing at hers. She took his hand.  
  
Time is a series of branching paths. They went left, Me stayed put. Sitting on a bench watching the sun set.  
  
  
(Me came home first, setting her walkie-talkie on the TARDIS console and slipping her bag off her shoulders before heading back out to the diner. She sat down at the counter and opened her journal to a blank page, uncapped the pen the Doctor had given her, willing the words to come.)

 

* * *

  
  
The Talfmann constant: all objects in the vortex vibrate at the same frequency. This meant them, in the TARDIS, and the vortisaur they were attempting to outrun.  
  
"It's a dragon," Clara said. Baffled and deeply excited. "An actual _dragon_."  
  
Me hung onto the info-readout screen that had wheezed dutifully from the console. White-knuckling the edges as the ship jolted, her feet skidding. "Vortisaur," she corrected.  
  
"Whatever. Is it - do we have weapons? Is this a dogfight? What do we do?"  
  
The viewscreen on the console room wall unveiling itself. And on-screen: the vortex swirling around them. The creature spreading its wings, mouth open, teeth bared. Something joyous about it.  
  
The info-readout screen unspooled an encylopedia entry, Levall Quadrant specific. Vortisaur, presumed extinct. A cryptid, rumours abounding and cited below. An ancient, forgotten, mythological thing. Howling and coasting on the time winds, nudging the TARDIS just a hair out of its flight path. Not attacking. This wasn't a fight.  
  
Me smiled, some odd, unnamed emotion pricking at her eyes. "I think. I think it's just playing."  
  
The TARDIS warbled happily and flung itself eagerly along, the floor tilting and falling away, gravity sometimes forgotten. The vortisaur pulled ahead, wings flapping, edges shifting. Here and nowhere, the TARDIS scrambling after it.  


 

* * *

  
  
They were running from the local police force. For, what, the fifth time? This was the fifth time overall this had happened so far, since they'd first fled Gallifrey.  
  
Running from the coppers and Clara's hand found hers, dragging her along. Breathless and shaky-legged behind Clara, who was once again taking advantage of the fact that she didn't feel pain, or get tired, or experience shin splints or sore feet or any of that. Through a government building, harsh and monolithic, tall ceilings and blank walls and surveillance cameras that Clara waved her sonic at as they passed. Electronics burning, lenses cracking. The trail they left behind them.  
  
She pulled Me through a doorway, that she somehow knew was unlocked. A supply closet, mops and bog roll and spray bottles. And them.  
  
Me reached up on tip-toes and yanked on the dangling cord for the light. It flickered on. Here they were, then. Her breath held - Clara biting her lip - close and still as the footsteps approached and then went past. Shoe-squeaks on linoleum, the radio crackle, voices fading off into the distance.  
  
_Wait_ , Clara mouthed.  
  
Me nodded.  
  
It was a small room; they were fairly close together, necessarily. Clara seemed to expect something from her. Not breathing hard and not trembling and none of the physical tells Me had long, long since memorized, but still. A hesitation, a particular look in her eyes. So.  
  
Me stood up on tiptoes again, her hand tentative on the back of Clara's neck, and kissed her. Lightly, quickly. She settled back down to her heels and wiped her mouth and didn't look Clara in the eyes as they stepped back out into the hallway. Look both ways, screw your courage, run.  


 

* * *

  
  
Write it down, write it all down. Everything you've done, everything you are. Everything you hope to one day be.  
  
That was the idea, anyway. Me tended to wind up frustrated, gritted teeth, second-guessing everything. When's the last time this had been so hard? Centuries ago, surely. When she'd known other people, really known them. When she'd wanted to, what. Impress them? Live up to their expectations?  
  
When was the last time anyone had read what she'd written? Let alone a friend. Let alone - whatever Clara was.  
  
Pen hovering over paper and the idea that there was something she should write, had to write, if only she could remember what it was. A confession, an apology. A hand held out. An explanation, at least, of what she was. All those millenia gone by and she was still afflicted with garden-variety writer's block. The common fear, a self-defeating, self-prophesizing second guessing.  
  
So she wrote,  
  
_I don't know what to write_  
  
and  
  
_It's silly, I know, but I'm scared._  


 

* * *

  
  
"I read some of your journals," Clara said. "The more recent ones."  
  
It was okay. Me had told her to help herself, figured it would be easier and far less confrontational than saying anything out loud. Besides, Clara was curious, and Me didn't have half of the answers she wanted. Not anymore. Confronted with the fact of it, her past spread bare, though - it was a bit awkward.  
  
"Mostly skimming for mentions of me." A lie, most probably, but with a decent basis in truth.  
  
"I hope I didn't offend you."  
  
"No, no. Your honesty is refreshing."  
  
Me wouldn't exactly call herself honest. "Well. Any questions? I might be able to answer some of them."  
  
Clara stared at her, eyes wide. Hands curled white-knuckle into fists. No hitched breaths and no nervous tics, but an anticipation. A question.  
  
Me waited. Clara broke eye contact. The pause lingered.  
  
"Right," Me said.  
  
"It's just - " Clara said, simultaneously.  
  
Me gestured for Clara to go first. And Clara darted forward, cupped her hand around the back of Me's head, fingers threading through her hair, and kissed her. Hard.  
  
She pulled away, her hands trailing down Me's neck. Me waited. Hands firm on her shoulders, collarbones, leather jacket parted - Me gasped, just a half of a noise before remembering herself, swallowing it down. Clara's hands on her breasts, and her mouth on hers again.  
  
"Is this okay?"  
  
Me considered, head ducked, her nose brushing the soft skin at the junction between Clara's neck and shoulder. She had a library full of books that explained why this sort of thing was a mistake, a data gel two million miles way detailing all the ways this would fail. Trap Street was always there, always the end of the road.  
  
Time is a dice-roll, time is all the things that happen before everything ends. Me smiled, and took Clara's hands, fingers weaving into hers.  
  
"Yeah," she said. "It's okay."


End file.
